Treesearch

A cornerstone of effective institutional learning and accountability is the development, tracking, and analysis of informative performance measures. In a previous issue of Fire Management Today ("A New Look at Risk Management," Winter 2011), a series of articles highlighted the importance of organizational safety and risk management and the challenges of balancing safety, efficiency, and effectiveness in the wildfire management environment. Assessing risks to firefighter safety can be difficult, especially in the complex, uncertain, and dynamic environment of active incident management....

This indicator uses population trends of selected bird and tree species as a surrogate measure of genetic diversity. Population decreases, especially associated with small populations, can lead to decreases in genetic diversity, and contribute to increased risk of extinction. Many forest-associated species rely on some particular forest structure, vegetation associations, or ecological processes. Monitoring population levels of such representative species will indicate the status of the associations of species associated with specialized conditions. Management use of this indicator will...

This indicator provides information on the number and status of forest-associated species at risk or in serious decline. It accomplishes this by monitoring the number of native species that have been identified by conservation science or mandate to be at risk of global extinction. As the number of species considered to be rare increases, the likelihood of species extinction also increases. Demographic and environmental events such as failure to find a mate, disease, disturbance, habitat loss, and climate change interact to increase extinction risk as populations become smaller. Because...

This indicator provides information on the health of forest ecosystems through the number of native forest-associated species. Because one of the more general signs of ecosystem stress is a reduction in the variety of organisms inhabiting a given locale, species counts are often used in assessing ecosystem well-being. The count of forest-associated species in a region will change when species become extinct, species colonize, or our knowledge base is improved. Although change in species counts because of improved knowledge of distribution or taxonomy is unrelated to biodiversity conservatio...

Streamside management zones (SMZs) are special landscape units that include riparian areas and adjacent lands that mitigate the movement of sediment, nutrients and other chemicals from upland forest and agricultural management areas into streams. The size, shape, and management of SMZs are governed by various combinations of economic, ecological, and regulatory factors. Although SMZs used around the world have a wide range of widths, in many cases they are similar at 5-20 m.

This guidebook is to help the rancher and/or land manager use business planning and ecological monitoring to ensure the ranch or land is managed in a sustainable manner.

Wood-boring larvae in the families Cerambycidae and Buprestidae are often found in high densities in burned trees after wildland fires. They play an important role in tree decomposition, often reducing the value of salvageable timber, and represent an important avian food source.

The goal of this user manual is to explain the technical aspects of the current release of the CDPOP program. CDPOP v1.0 is a major extension of the CDPOP program (Landguth and Cushman 2010). CDPOP is an individual-based program that simulates the influences of landscape structure on emergence of spatial patterns in population genetic data as functions of individual-based movement, breeding, and dispersal.

Habitat loss and its effects on populations of vulnerable species is among the most urgent problems in conservation ecology. It is critical that managers and scientists have effective tools to evaluate the effects of landuse and climate change on the extent and connectivity of populations. To address this need, we introduce UNIversal CORridor network simulator (UNICOR), a species connectivity and corridor identification tool. UNICOR applies Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to individual-based simulations. Outputs can be used to designate movement corridors, identify isolated populations,...

The human-caused Schultz Fire near Flagstaff, Arizona burned 6,100 ha (15,075 acres) on the Coconino National Forest between June 20th and 30th, 2010. Ignited by an abandoned campfire, high winds drove the fire over approximately 60% of the total area burned during the first 12 hours (U.S. Forest Service, 2010). The majority of the area burned at moderate (27%) or high (40%) severity across slopes of 30% to over 100%, through forests of ponderosa pine and mixed conifer. Nine of eleven 6th code watersheds were almost completely burned, with areas of high burn severity covering more than 50%...